Notifications (formerly known as Echo, commonly called pinging) is a Wikipedia web-service designed to inform users about new activity on Wikipedia in a unified way. It provides notifications to users for a number of events related to their account, including new talk page messages, edit reverts, mentions or links.

It is intended to augment (rather than replace) the Watchlist, by highlighting key user interactions that includes users being mentioned in posts and new messages on a user's Talk page.

Notifications are displayed to the right of the username and user-talk links in the top link bar of the page for logged-in users, displaying two coloured squares ("badges"), each with a number representing the number of recent notifications. Email notifications can be set up for some or all types of notification as a user Preference.

Notification messages

The notifications popup informs you of new activity on Wikipedia that concerns you.

You can find recent notifications not only by clicking on the coloured squares ("badges") in the top link bar of every page, but also in a special archive containing up to 2,000 of your past notifications on one page: Special:Notifications. For other tips on how to use this tool, visit this FAQ page.

Triggering events

The current iteration of the notification system uses a split-template design, with "Your alerts" on the left, and "Your messages" on the right. A yellow highlight is shown for new messages on your user talk page.

As of November 2014[update], eight types of events can trigger an "Alert" or "New message" notification. You can customize which notifications you receive by turning each type of notification on or off individually at the Notifications tab of your Preferences.

You can also trigger notification messages for another editor by mentioning that editor's user name in those of the following events to which you have access. This is known as {{ping}}ing the user.

Alerts

When one of the following things occurs, you will get a notification as an alert, which is represented by the bell-shaped icon next to your user page link.

Talk page messages: When a message is left on your user talk page.

This replaced the full-width orange banner stating "You have a new message from another user", but by default a small orange tag will be displayed next to the notification to highlight it.

Talk page messages are the only type of notification which cannot be disabled; a web notification will always be sent.

Mentions: When your user page is linked to on any talk page or on a page in the Wikipedia namespace by another user.

A number of templates are used for this – {{User}}, {{User link}}, and {{Reply to}} are common examples – which will all trigger notifications. Plain links to user pages will also work to notify the mentioned user. An example of a "plain link": [[User:Example]].

This is one of the most popular uses of notifications; often used to inform other people about ongoing discussions of interest to them, or to let them know of a reply to a message on a page they may not be watching.

Registered users can be notified by other users and by IPs, however, an IP cannot be notified by any templates or links.

Note that the post containing a link to a user page must be signed; if the mention is not on a completely new line with a new signature, no notification will be sent.

There may be some cases where mentioning can be unintentional, for instance, userpage links in templates like {{admin}} or {{usercheck-short}} will cause a mention. If accompanied by a signed reply, edits refactoring other's comments, such as attributing unsigned comments and/or formatting others' posts, can sometimes trigger a mention. More details are available at mw:Help:Echo § Technical details.

Failed mention: Notifies when you could not send out a mention to someone.

Successful mention: Notifies when you send out a mention to someone.

Edit reverts: When one of your edits is reverted, or "rolled back", by another user.

Course talk: When anyone posts to the talk page of an active course page you are participating in.

Emails from other users: You will get an alert any time another user sends you an email through the wiki.

Notices

These notifications are categorized under "notices," which is represented by the icon directly to the right of the "alerts" icon.

Milestone: You will get a notice when you've made your first, tenth, hundredth, thousandth, ten-thousandth, hundred-thousandth, and millionth edit. For example, after you've made your first edit, the notice will say, "You just made your first edit; thank you, and welcome!"

Page links: When a new link is added to a page that links to a page that you created.

Welcome: As soon as you've created an account, you will get a "Welcome" notification saying, "Welcome to Wikipedia, [User]! We're glad you're here." which links to Help:Getting started

Blacklist and whitelist

There is a site-wide list of accounts that cannot trigger notifications at MediaWiki:Echo-blacklist which can be overridden by users at Special:MyPage/Echo-whitelist. As of November 2014[update], it contains one entry; SineBot (talk·contribs). SineBot adds signatures (including linking to usernames) of users who don't sign their posts; if it were able to trigger notifications, it would be notifying hundreds of people daily without real benefit. If you wish to be notified that SineBot has signed one of your posts, you can whitelist it.

Spamming

To prevent spamming, if you mention more than 50 users in a single post, then no notifications will be sent.

Known bugs

There are a number of bugs currently known with the notifications system:

Failure to spot signatures. In some cases (usually when changing another, recent, comment with a signature) the parser does not realise that a user has made a new signed comment, and so does not trigger a notification. The technical requirements for notifications to work are described in mw:Help:Echo § Technical details.

Confusing section titles. On pages with complicated markup, or after edit conflicts, the notification will sometimes give the wrong section heading for a message.

Transclusion. Because a notification is generated whenever a page is linked to, accidental transclusion of other pages can cause a sudden flurry of unintentional notifications through links on the transcluded page.

The team plans to develop a few more features and notifications, based on community feedback. The editor engagement team expects this notification tool to be an integral part of future engagement projects, such as the upcoming Flow messaging feature. In February 2016 the Beta-test for Cross-wiki notifications started.

Newsletter

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